In the early days, Brainiac's Tim Taylor and Juan Monstaterio were not co-workers at the local burger joint, nor were they fellow bartenders in Dayton's hipster dive. No, Tim and Juan were mere tykes, schoolboys if you will, vying against each other in math competitions, and later, playing cello together in the high school orchestra. Simply enough, they were not the sex-driven, thrift-store clad rockers that they are today.
So how then, did they make that transition from being the geeks in the band to the babes in the band?
"I still feel like a geek in the band," vocal sensation and Moog maestro, Tim, laughed on the phone from the backwards Mormon city of Salt Lake. "It's all the same I think, to an extent. I mean Juan and I grew up together. We've known each other since we were 10 years old. We just went through a series of reinvention. We figured out when we were 16, we finally were like "Wow! You can just reinvent yourself, and after six months, no one's going to give you any flak about it...At first we had this complete goth thing, then we did this or that, and it was to sort of to test everybody around us and what they thought. And we've had all these bands [and] there's no connection whatsoever to Brainiac. The band we were in before this sounded like Sly and the Family Stone and it was totally, completely 100% different and I don't know why more people just don't realize that they're totally at liberty to do that."
Well, it's 1997 and Tim and Juan still make up 1/2 of one of Dayton's most off-kilter and eclectic bands (along with drummer Tyler Trent and guitarist John Schemersal)&emdash;eight years after their inception. They've just released "Electro Shock For President," an e.p. that combines a penchant for pop hooks and the band's trademark Moog-laced electronic stylings. And although the band hasn't changed dramatically between releases, their latest e.p. emits a different aura from the very warped electro-twisted "Hissing Prigs In Static Couture."
"I kind of feel that the e.p. is a little more straight myself. There are a couple of songs that are more structurally, just pop songs. Plus I think that after "Hissing Prigs," we were like, "We're not going to do this anymore." It just felt like we were trying to outweird ourselves and then we kind of realized that we worked ourselves into a box...After we did "Hissing Prigs," it was like "Well, this is our music in the end, we have to make something we can enjoy."
However having all four members agree on what's in or out, in terms of the music, is a far different matter.
"I think if anything, there've been things that I wasn't happy with that were because somebody in the band, or everybody else in the band felt happier with. The only [album] I was completely 100% happy with was "Bonsai Superstar." But there's a lot of stuff where I'd just go steamroll over everybody else's opinion or bad idea...Usually what happens is that if somebody says something, then I'll get really defensive and mad and then at the next practice I'll realize I was just being a defensive idiot and realize that they were right or whatever and come back down to the ground."
But one aspect that they all seem to agree on is their desire to completely and utterly confuse people and their perceptions of the band. One instance is when the band put "Fuck E-Mail" next to their mailing address on the sleeve of their last album. "I'm totally an e-mail guy and [Juan] is too. But he designs all [the artwork] on his computer and somehow when he was working on that record actually, lightening got into his line&emdash;he thinks it was lightening that struck the house&emdash;and erased a lot of the artwork and it also blew his modem up...That's not anti-computer at all and I think a lot of people have confused it as that...At least what I can tell from [Juan's] graphics and stuff, he just puts a lot of things in deliberately to irritate and confuse people...I don't really ask him much about it. I mean, I put in a lot of things [in the music] to irritate and confuse people."
I suppose that Brainiac get their craving for the outlandish from growing up in such an un-hip town like Dayton. Although the press would like you to believe otherwise after the success of The Breeders, Amps, and Guided By Voices. "It might give you the allusion that there's a happening scene, but there's not at all. As of right now, there's not even a record store where you can buy our records in town. You have to go to Columbus to buy a Brainiac record, it's ridiculous. Three years ago, it was totally different, there was this great record store and there were all kinds of new bands happening, it was really fun.
"The Dayton daily newspaper picked up on what was going on with the bands because The Breeders and Guided By Voices were getting all this national press and The Dayton Daily was like "Wow maybe we should write something about them." And the local music reporter started to come around...the shows were getting huge and all these people were into it. And then that guy got fired and now it kinda went back to zero again."
And although the city resembles more of a burnt out factory town than a budding cosmopolitan, it did have it's 15 minutes back in the day.
"We had our glory years with WKRP in Cincinnati. What's funny is that all those people are from Dayton. A couple of the people went to school with my mom like Gary Sandy [who played that 'fox' Andy Travis] and that Gordon Jump guy is from Dayton. I used to play in this other band with my dad&emdash;this jazz dinner music type stuff&emdash;and we played this banquet where Gary Sandy spoke and it was really funny. We hung out with him and he looks exactly the same. Same hair, he even had one of those 70s apple hats on and a denim shirt...He's waiting for the comeback I think. I can't wait."
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